[HN Gopher] The Five Levels: From spicy autocomplete to the dark...
___________________________________________________________________
The Five Levels: From spicy autocomplete to the dark factory
Author : benwerd
Score : 30 points
Date : 2026-01-23 22:55 UTC (5 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.danshapiro.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.danshapiro.com)
| ekidd wrote:
| Having actually _run_ some of the software produced by nearly
| "dark software factories," a lot of that software is _completely
| shit._
|
| Yegge's Beads is a genuinely good design, for example, but it's
| flakier and more broken the Unix vendor Motif implementations in
| 1993, and it eats itself more often than Windows 98 would blue
| screen.
|
| I can actually run a bunch of orchestrated agents, and get code
| which isn't complete shit. But it's an extremely skill-intensive
| process, because I'm acting as product manager, lead engineer,
| and the backstop for the holes in the cognition of a bunch of
| different Claudes.
|
| So far, the people promising completely dark software factories
| are either high on their own supply, or grifting to sell books
| (or occasionally crypto). Or so I judge from using the programs
| they ship.
| xg15 wrote:
| I found it kind of fitting that didn't even describe what a
| human would still do at level 5 nor why it would be desirable.
| It's just the "natural" progression of a 5 step ladder and that
| seems to be reason enough.
| thenfcm wrote:
| Well isnt the point humans wouldn't need to do basically
| anything?
|
| It would be 'desirable' because the value is in the product
| of the labour not the labour itself. (Of course the resulting
| dystopian hellscape might be considered undesirable)
| ekidd wrote:
| As I keep pointing out, if the model ever stops needing you
| to complete ambitious goals, then what does the model
| actually need you for?
|
| People somehow imagine an agent that can crush the
| competition with minimal human oversight. And then they
| somehow think that _they 'll_ be in charge, and not Sam
| Altman, a government, or possibly the model itself.
|
| If the model's that good, nobody's going to sell it to you.
| saulpw wrote:
| One of other authors he links to[0] brags that he's released 10
| projects in the past month, like "Super Xtreme Mapper, a high-
| end, professional MIDI mapping software for professional DJs",
| which has 4 stars on Github. Despite the "high-end,
| professional...for professional" description, literally no one is
| going to use it, because this guy can't [be trusted to] maintain
| this software. Even if Claude Code is doing all the work, adding
| all the features, and fixing all the bugs, someone has to issue
| the command to do that work, and to foot the bill. This guy is
| just spraying code around and snorting digital coke.
|
| There is plausibly something here with AI-generated code but as
| always, the value is not in the first release but in the years of
| maintenance and maturation that makes it something you can use
| and invest in. The problem with AI is that it's giving these
| people hyper-ADHD, they can't commit to anything, and no one will
| use vibe-coded tools--I'm betting not even themselves after a
| month.
|
| [0] https://nraford7.github.io/road-runner-economy/
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| > snorting digital coke
|
| What an apt description -- the website on the other side of
| that link is the most coked-out design I've ever seen.
| Dr_Birdbrain wrote:
| My feeling is that AI-generated code is disposable code.
|
| It's great if you can quickly stand up a tool that scratches an
| itch for you, but there is minimal value in it for other
| people, and it probably doesn't make sense to share it in a
| repo.
|
| Other people could just quickly vibe-code something of equal
| quality.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| That's how I've been using and treating it, though I'm not
| primarily a developer. I work in ops, and LLMs write all
| sorts of disposable code for me. Primarily one-off scripts or
| little personal utilities. These don't get shared with anyone
| else, or put on github, etc. but have been incredibly
| helpful. SQL queries, some python to clean up or dig through
| some data sets, log files, etc. to spit out a quick result
| when something more robust or permanent isn't needed.
|
| Plus, so far, LLMs seem better at writing code to do a thing
| over directly doing the thing, where it's more likely to
| hallucinate, especially when it comes to working with large
| CSV or Json files. "Re-order this CSV file to be in
| Alphabetical order by the Name field" will make up fake data,
| but "Write a python script to order the Name filed in this
| CSV to be alphabetical" will succeed.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| My growing (cynical) feeling is that AI-generated code is
| legacy-code-as-a-service. It is by nature trained on other
| people and company's legacy code. (There's the training set
| window which is always in the past. There's the economics
| question of which companies would ever volunteer to opt-in
| their best proprietary production code into training sets.
| Sure there are a few entirely open source companies, but
| those are still the exception and not the rule.) "Vibe code"
| is essentially delivered as Day Zero "Legacy Code" in the
| sense that the person who wrote that code is essentially no
| longer at the company (even if context windows get extended
| to incredibly huge sizes and you have great prompt
| preservation tools, eventually you no longer have the
| original context and not to mention that the Models
| themselves retrain and get upgraded every so many months are
| essentially "different people" each time. But most
| importantly the Models themselves can't tell you the
| motivating "how" or "why" of anything, at best maybe good
| specs documents and prompts do, but even that can be a
| gamble).
|
| The article starts with a lot of words about how the meaning
| and nature of "tech debt" are going to change a lot as AI
| adoption increases and more vibe coding happens, but I think
| I disagree on what that change means. I don't AI reduces
| "tech debt". I don't think it is "deflationary" in any way. I
| think AI are going to gift us a world of tech debt
| "hyperinflation". When every application in a company is
| "legacy code" all you _have_ is tech debt.
|
| Having worked in companies with lots of legacy code, the
| thing you learn is that those apps are never as disposable as
| you want to believe. The sunk cost fallacy kicks in.
| (Generative AI Tokens are currently cheap, but cheap isn't
| free. Budgets still exist.) Various status quo fallacies kick
| in: "that's how the system has always worked", "we have to
| ensure every new version is backwards compatible with the old
| version", "we can't break anyone's existing
| process/workflow", "we can't require retraining", "we need
| 1:1 all the same features", and so forth.
|
| You can't just "vibe code" something of equal quality if you
| can't even figure out what "equal quality" means. That's many
| the death of a legacy code "rewrite project". By the time
| you've figured out how every user uses it (including how many
| bugs are load-bearing features in _someone 's_ process) you
| have too many requirements to consider, not enough time or
| budget left, and eventually a mandate to quit and "not fix
| what isn't broken". (Except it was broken enough to start up
| a discovery process at least once, and may do so again when
| the next team thinks they can dream up a budget for it.)
|
| Tech debt isn't going away and tech debt isn't getting
| eliminated. Tech Debt is getting baked into Day Zero of
| production operations. (Projects may be starting already "in
| hock to creditors". The article says "Dark Software Factory"
| but I read "Dark Software Pawn Shop".) Tech debt is
| potentially increasing at a faster than human scale of
| understanding it. I feel like Legacy Code skills are going to
| be in higher demand than ever. It is maybe going to be
| "deflationary" in cost for those jobs but only because the
| supply of Legacy Code projects will be so high and software
| developers will have a buffet to choose from.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| Software products are about unique competitive value that grows
| over time. Products have it or not. AI produced software is
| like open source in a sense, you get something for free. But
| whose gonna get rich if everybody can just duplicate your
| product by asking AI to do it, again?
|
| Think of investing in the stock market by asking AI to do all
| the trading, for you. Great maybe you make some money. But when
| everybody catches on that it is better to let the AI do the
| trading, then others's AI is gonna buy the same stocks as
| yours, and their price goes up. Less value for you.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Spot on. That's why so far all of the supposed solutions to
| 'the programmer problem' have failed.
|
| Whether this time it will be different I don't know. But
| originally compilers were supposed to kill off the
| programmers. Then it was 3G and 4G languages (70's, 80's).
| Then it was 'no code' which eventually became 'low code'
| because those pesky edge cases kept cropping up. Now it is
| AI, the 'dark factory' and other fearmongering. I'll believe
| it when I see it.
|
| Another HN'er has pointed me into an interesting direction
| that I think is more realistic: AI will become a tool in the
| toolbox that will allow experts to do what they did before
| but faster and hopefully better. It will also be the tool
| that will generate a ton of really, really bad code that
| people will indeed not look at because they can not afford to
| look at it: you can generate more work for a person in a few
| seconds of compute time than you can cover in a lifetime. So
| you end up with half baked buggy and insecure solutions that
| do sort of work on the happy path but that also include a ton
| of stuff that wasn't supposed to be there in the first place
| but that wasn't explicitly spelled out in the test set (which
| is a pretty good reflection of my typical interaction with
| AI).
|
| The whole thing hinges on whether or not that can be fixed.
| But I'm looking forward to reading someone's vibe coded
| solution that is in production at some presumably secure
| installation.
|
| I'm going to bet that 'I blame the AI' is a pattern what we
| will be seeing a lot of.
| exmadscientist wrote:
| In the long run, it's going to become about specifications.
|
| Code is valuable because it tells computers what you want
| them to do. If that can be done at a higher level, by
| writing a great specification that lets some AI dark
| factory somewhere just write the app for you in an hour,
| then the code is now worthless but the spec is as valuable
| as the code ever was. You can just recode the entire app
| any time you want a change! And even if AI deletes itself
| from existence or whatever, a detailed specification is
| still worth a lot.
|
| Whoever figures out how to describe useful software in a
| way that can get AI agents to reliably rebuild it from
| human-authored specifications is going to get a lot of
| attention over the next ~decade.
| observationist wrote:
| There's this notion of software maintenance - that software
| which serves a purpose must be perennially updated and changed
| - which is a huge, rancid fallacy. If the software tool
| performs the task it's designed to perform, and the user gets
| utility out of it, it doesn't matter if the software is a
| decade old and hasn't been updated.
|
| Sometimes it might, if there are security implications. You
| might need to fix bugs in networking code, or update crypto
| handling, or whatever, and those types of things are fine. The
| idea that you can't have legitimately useful one-off software,
| used by millions, despite not being updated, is a silly
| artifact of the MBA takeover of big tech.
|
| Continuous development is not intrinsic to the "goodness" of
| software. Sometimes it's a big disappointment if software
| hasn't been updated consistently, but other times, it just
| doesnt matter. I've got scripts, little apps, tools, things
| that I've used, sometimes daily, for over a decade, that
| _never_ ever ever get updated, and I 'd be annoyed if I had to.
| They have simple tasks to perform that they do well; you dont
| need all the rest of the "and now we have liquid glass icons!
| oh, and mandatory telemetry, and if you want ads to go away,
| you must pay for a premium subscription"
|
| The value is in the utility - the work done by the software.
| How much effort and maintenance goes into creating it often has
| nothing to do with how useful it is.
|
| Look at windows 11 - hundreds of billions of dollars and years
| of development and maintenance and it's a steaming pile of
| horseshit. They're driving people to Linux in record numbers.
|
| Blender is a counter example. They're constructive and
| deliberate.
|
| What's likely to happen is everyone will have AI access to
| built-on-the-fly apps and tools that they retain for future
| use, and platforms will consolidate and optimize the available
| tools, and nobody will need to vibe-code or engage in extensive
| software development when their AI butler can do all the
| software work they might need done.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Sure, but the reason why this is the case is simple: writing
| software is easy. Writing _good_ software is stupendously
| hard. So all those manyears that went into maintaining
| software were effectively just hardening, polishing bug fixes
| and slow adjustment to changing requirements and new
| situations. If you throw it all out whenever the requirements
| change you never and up with something that is secure or as
| bug free as you can make it.
| anyonecancode wrote:
| > There's this notion of software maintenance - that software
| which serves a purpose must be perennially updated and
| changed - which is a huge, rancid fallacy. If the software
| tool performs the task it's designed to perform, and the user
| gets utility out of it, it doesn't matter if the software is
| a decade old and hasn't been updated.
|
| If what you are saying is that _maintenance_ is not the same
| as feature updates and changes, then I agree. If you are
| literally saying that you think software, once released,
| doesn't ever need any further changes for maintenance rather
| than feature reasons, I disagree.
|
| For instance, you mention "security implications," but as a
| "might" not "will." I think this vastly underestimates
| security issues inherent in software. I'd go so far say that
| all software has two categories of security issues -- those
| that known today, and those that will be uncovered in the
| future.
|
| Then there's the issue of the runtime environment changing.
| If it's web-based, changing browser capabilities, for
| instance. Or APIs it called changing or breaking. Etc.
|
| Software may not be physical, but it's subject to entropy as
| much as roads, rails, and other good and infrastructure out
| in the non-digital world.
| lifetimerubyist wrote:
| This is why I just roll my eyes when people are like "i'm
| building things I just didn't have time for before"
|
| Ever stop to wonder that maybe the reason you didn't build it
| and didn't MAKE the time to build it is...because the idea
| sucks?
|
| Nobody wants your idea slop.
|
| None of these vibe coded businesses are going to last long term
| because guess what - why would I pay you anything when I will
| be able to just vibe code the thing I want myself if I want it
| bad enough?
|
| Project vomit is just for people that want to pad their github
| stats. It's programmer virtue signalling. Yawn.
| vunderba wrote:
| _> The problem with AI is that it 's giving these people hyper-
| ADHD_
|
| Shouldn't be a problem - I've seen _AT LEAST_ half a dozen
| almost-assuredly vibe coded projects related to dealing with
| ADHD in the last month...
|
| Show HN: I gamified a productivity app to help my ADHD friends
| get things done https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46797212
|
| Show HN: built a 24h-clock based radial planner to help with
| ADHD time blindness
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46668890
|
| Show HN: DayZen: Visual day planner for ADHD brains
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46742799
|
| Show HN: ADHD Focus Light
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46537708
|
| Show HN: I built Focusmo - a focus app for ADHD time-blindness
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46695618
|
| Show HN: Local-First ADHD Planner for Windows and Android
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46646188
| ben_w wrote:
| > One of other authors he links to[0] brags that he's released
| 10 projects in the past month, like "Super Xtreme Mapper, a
| high-end, professional MIDI mapping software for professional
| DJs", which has 4 stars on Github. Despite the "high-end,
| professional...for professional" description, literally no one
| is going to use it, because this guy can't [be trusted to]
| maintain this software. Even if Claude Code is doing all the
| work, adding all the features, and fixing all the bugs, someone
| has to issue the command to do that work, and to foot the bill.
| This guy is just spraying code around and snorting digital
| coke.
|
| While I'd expect almost nobody to use apps meeting this
| description, I disagree about why:
|
| It's not that other people have to foot the bill, it's that the
| bill is so low that it's a question of this particular app
| being discovered amongst all the others.
|
| $15/month is a rounding error on most budgets. If every
| musician buys a Claude subscription and prompts for their own
| variations on this idea, there's a few million other apps that
| also do all that this app does, which vary from completely
| identical (because the prompts themselves were also) to utterly
| personalised for the particular preferences of exactly one
| artist.
| simonw wrote:
| I've talked to a team that's doing the dark factory pattern
| hinted at here. It was _fascinating_. The key characteristics:
|
| - Nobody reviews AI-produced code, ever. They don't even look at
| it.
|
| - The goal of the system is to prove that the system works. A
| huge amount of the coding agent work goes into testing and
| tooling and simulating related systems and running demos.
|
| - The role of the humans is to design that system - to find new
| patterns that can help the agents work more effectively and
| demonstrate that the software they are building is robust and
| effective.
|
| It was a tiny team and they stuff they had built in just a few
| months looked very convincing to me. Some of them had 20+ years
| of experience as software developers working on systems with high
| reliability requirements, so they were not approaching this from
| a naive perspective.
|
| I'm hoping they come out of stealth soon because I can't really
| share more details than this.
| observationist wrote:
| You'd think at some point it'll be enough to tell the AI "ok,
| now do a thorough security audit, highlight all the potential
| issues, come up with a best practices design document, and fix
| all the vulnerabilities and bugs. Repeat until the codebase is
| secure and meets all the requisite protocol standards and
| industry best practices."
|
| We're not there yet, but at some point, AI is gonna be able to
| blitz through things like that the way they blitz through
| making haikus or rewriting news articles. At some point AI will
| just be reliably competent.
|
| Definitely not there yet. The dark factory pattern is
| terrifying, lol.
| simonw wrote:
| That's definitely a pattern people are already starting to
| have good results from - using multiple "agents" (aka
| multiple system prompts) where one of them is a security
| reviewer that audits for problems and files issues for other
| coding agents to then fix.
|
| I don't think this worked at all well six months ago. GPT-5.2
| and Opus 4.5 might _just_ be good enough for this pattern to
| start being effective.
| jwpapi wrote:
| Honestly I'm not sure we're not there yet, run this prompt as
| a ralph loop for 2 days on your codebase and see where you
| at...
| badgersnake wrote:
| These hype articles are getting very boring.
| Animats wrote:
| This is a meta-hype article. It's an article about the hype.
| pphysch wrote:
| The autopilot analogy is good because level 4-5 are essentially
| vaporware outside of success in controlled environments backed by
| massive investment and engineering.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-01-28 23:00 UTC)